The evidence continues to mount that calling someone a bird brain is not an insult. The BBC has this story about two Rooks — European and Asian members of the corvid family, as are jays, crows and ravens — and their problem solving capacity. In the experiment two Rooks quickly learned that they needed to simultaneously pull on two separate strings to move food into their cage. If they pulled only at one string or did not pull on both at the same time the string pulled loose and the food remained outside the cage. The birds learned this just as rapidly as did chimpanzees, those distant relatives of ours usually thought to be the brightest members of non-human species.
I am sorry to say that you have to click on this link to go to the BBC site to watch the video. It is possible that someone more web-savvy could have moved the video to this page but I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet.
But you can listen to rooks. Rooks calling
But for other videos of Rooks, you’ll have to decamp from this blog and visit this site which someone smarter than I could probably have pasted on this page.
For all the other evidence we’ve accumulated at the Fat Finch you can click on our “Bird Brain” or the “Crows and Ravens” category over on the right of this page.
Fat Finch — Backyard Birds, Birding & Blogging 
April 14, 2008 at 2:20 am |
Caption: “I’m telling you, he went that way.” , “No, he went that way.”
April 24, 2008 at 3:15 am |
The BBC story reports: “The researchers are now keen to find out if other species of birds perform his kind of co-operative behaviour.”
As an organizational consultant interested in human learning and resilience, I find it interesting that many of our human challenges are precisely this one the rooks solved: pulling two strings at the same time.
July 22, 2013 at 3:57 pm |
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